Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday February 22, 2011 @03:21AM
from the it'll-be-different-this-time-baby-i-promise dept.

vbraga writes "The German government has confirmed that the German Foreign Office is to switch back to Windows desktop systems. The Foreign Office started migrating its servers to Linux in 2001 and since 2005 has also used open source software such as Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice on its desktop systems. The government's response to the SPD's question states that, although open source has demonstrated its worth, particularly on servers, the cost of adapting and extending it, for example in writing printer and scanner drivers, and of training, have proved greater than anticipated. The extent to which the potential savings trumpeted in 2007 have proved realizable has, according to the government, been limited – though it declines to give any actual figures. Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability."

Well,, I'm from Argentina, and I disagree. I know TONS of people (even non-geeks) that use ubuntu or some other flavor of linux on the desktop willingly, and the cost of a copy of windows here is absolutely irrelevant, as almost everyone pirates it, unless it came preloaded with a notebook or a brand pc (and even then, many notebooks come with win7 home or starter and it gets replaced with a pirated copy of win7 pro or ultimate).

Also while I agree there must be a few, I haven't seen any jobs where you're forced to use linux on the desktop, but so far I've worked on 3 companies that either let me install it on my desktop, or already had a corporate approved image with all the corresponding software to use at the workplace (i.e. with lotus notes etc)

More software makes a better OS. Microsoft, Apple, Google, and every OS, project or language depends on the programmers. Linux has few programmers, some of who work only on a part-time basis. Efforts to get more coders, like Google's Summer of Code, are some of the most efficient efforts to promote open source. I favor efforts that reward or incentivate open-source coders, such as awards, competitions, the threshold pledge system [wikipedia.org], or RSPP-Rational Street Performer Protocol, stuff like that. So people can freely code open-source stuff at leisure, and have reasonable expectations of achieving more than publishing the code and peer recognition, in case the project comes out good.

That's like saying practice makes perfect, so people go out and practice repeatedly and often. But of course practice DOES NOT make perfect. CORRECT practice makes perfect. Practicing the wrong thing over and over just makes you good at being bad. So adding programmers to add to the status quo will do nothing to help the situation.

What MS, Apple, Google, et al have done to be successful has been to practice correctly. They have coherent and well defined User Interfaces that are predictable and do what they

It's a matter of usability also. When more than half of that software are obscure command line utilities - which may well be helpful when combined properly as per "Unix way" etc - it doesn't really help your casual user.

The big problem with Linux application development, until fairly recently, was the lack of quality tools. Sure, the compiler toolchain was there, and backend (source control, bug tracking etc) was as well, but IDEs and documentation were lacking. When the easiest way to write a UI applicatio

Look, I understand the passion that people feel for Linux, FOSS, etc., but why is it sad news? If you step back and look at it from a 65,000 foot level, there are a few notes to take away.

First, try and understand why they made the switch back. It's probably not licensing fees, right? So it's more likely to be difficulty in switching, missing functionality, etc. What are the lessons to be learned?

Second, don't be sad. Seriously. I've said this before - it's supposed to be about choice. If someone chooses to use Windows/other Microsoft products/other closed source products, well then isn't that their choice? I know some people will say "but it's wrong, abc product always crashes, MS can't build secure software" and so on. But - a technologist's job is to find the best solution, for whatever value of best applies to the particular customer in their particular context. And sometimes that may be a Microsoft product, or some other closed source product.* No product is a one-size-fits-all item. If you try and force something to fit the problem, or argue from politics or ideals rather than logic, you're less likely to make a positive impression.

Sometimes it seems as though people on this site want Linux to be everything to everyone, everywhere. I suppose it's not technically a monopoly, and maybe it's harder to argue that there's a lack of freedom of choice if there are different distributions - but I think it goes against the spirit of freedom and competition.

* Except for CA. They're dreadful, and there is never a context where CA is the best solution.

OS platforms are tools. Much like hammers and screwdrivers, one tool does not fit all. Pick the best tool for the job, move on. Ideology be damned. Hammering nails with a screwdriver just because of some religious devotion when you could get the work done far quicker with a hammer is retarded. In the business world, that sort of shit will get you fired (eventually).

There are things that linux (or bsd) do very well. There are others that they don't (and often these are areas where Windows or OS X excel). Work out what you want t do then choose the appropriate platform. Much of the time this will result in a mixed environment.

They evaluated both Linux and Windows on TCO and decided that Windows was cheaper. Given that an enterprise agreement gets you perpetual upgradable Windows+office licenses at something like (from memory) $80/pc including av software, and a heap of enterprise apps its fairly attractive.

The second you need to employe a nerd to remedy a problem you just would not have had on windows that "free" software starts going up in TCO. Same with Windows sure, but Windows support (even "have you tried turning it of

Your argument may be valid when it comes to private companies or private users, but this is government that we're talking about. A government that is sponsored by the public taxes. I do not wish to spend my hard earned money on proprietary software that cannot be accessed.

So long as all their output (reports etc) is in open formats, and they accept such for input, why would you care whether the software that produces or handles the data is open source or not?

"I find it curious that Linux on the desktop should be so well accepted in some markets (especially Latin America) and resisted so vigorously in others. Anyway, this is sad news, whatever the reasons."

People just don't want to learn new things, the truth is linux distro's that wanted to be desktops really should have copied windows UI and apps and just cloned them for wider acceptance, to take the learning curve out of it. Linux is evidence of what happens when you leave development of an OS to programmer

Germans don't have as much of a need for credit cards because they either prefer to pay cash or they use their bank cards (basically authorizes the store to debit the money straight from the respective bank account). Not that different from the US where people are still using checks but simply without the need to waste tons of paper and thanks to international agreements the electronic payments are possible across borders.

That's why credit cards are looked at in this manner. They're either used to buy something on credit (read: pay with money you don't have) or in most cases an inconvenient necessity to buy from foreign vendors or for the occasional foreign customers.

Germans are well, germans, there is a reason why their industries are known for high quality. And it's a culture thing. Germans seems not the change easily. They seem to keep to ways of old, that have been proved to work.

So thats why they were "early" linux adopters, right?

No this is a symptom of the platform not performing as expected. The irony is that they're changing back just as cloud services are going to make their switch to linux more attractive.

I'm a true blue *nix junky. I only use windows if absolutely necessary and I've worked as a Linux and OSX sysadmin.
But I must admit that Windows one shining strength is just how turnkey it can be. There's really not much fiddling to be done at all.
In fact, the entire Windows client OS model revolves around preventing fiddling. An ethos that is the polar opposite of the Linux model of being designed around facilitating fiddling by the user.

This pervades everything in Linux, which is part of the reason why there is still so much fiddling involved in setting up a bunch of desktops and locking them down so no matter how much or little the end user knows, they can't mess it up.

And by can't mess it up, I mean literally cannot mess it up. Not "can mess it up but you can easily fix it by SSH'ing in as root and typing rm -rf ~user/.profile ; rm -rf ~user/.gnome-profile - or they can log in on a text terminal and do the same", cannot mess it up.

If your time isn't worth much then spending all day fiddling with Linux systems to get things working is OK.

So time spent fiddling with a Windows system is somehow magically free?

If the time spent is orders of magnitude less than getting an equivalent Linux desktop working the way you want, then yes. Especially when you start talking about thousands of machines, the relative cost of the Windows "fiddling" approaches zero.

This is especially true once you start looking at using Group Policy management and software deployment.

If your time isn't worth much then spending all day fiddling with Linux systems to get things working is OK.

So time spent fiddling with a Windows system is somehow magically free?

No, but you quoted the parent out of context:

In my own experience of getting ordinary people to use computers, Linux computers needed a lot more fiddling then Windows machines. I suspect the German government is finding out the same thing.

Emphasis mine.

I can well believe it. It's not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with any of the major desktop environments - or for that matter much of the underlying software - it's just that there's a whole plethora of tiny little things which work slightly differently to Windows - or indeed don't work at all out of the box. The latter is what you encounter around the time you find yourself saying things like "I thought I told you to buy a scanner made

Except most users when you come down to it, Linux or Windows or Macs or whatever, do the same thing. Some email, some presentations, some spreadsheets, etc. You don't need to fiddle. Many companies actually forbid you to fiddle with Windows, they're locked down and automatically configured remotely by IT. All you can do is change your desktop background or font size, if you're lucky.

Of course slashdotters don't fit into the generic mold, we probably see fiddling with the OS as an inalienable workers's r

Sorry, but if you have a competent Windows admin, you can get a lot done with minimal daily "fiddling".

You spend the money on quality hardware (then a huge number of driver related stability problems just vanish), licenses and monitoring, then move on to something more interesting than fucking around with the platform.

The downfall of an open source platform is that if you've customized it in any way to get the job done (as you often are required to do) then you need a high-value ($$$$$) resource to fix

Standard procedure at this point is to blame the users; "I don't like using this." "What are you, a retard?"

I love Linux, but facts are for the average user its desktop experience is not as pleasant as Windows. Now you can blame anyone you like about that; it's the users' because they can't/won't learn anything different, it's the hardware vendors for not providing appropriate drivers, it's the developers for writing impenetrable half-assed documentation, but the end result is the same. And the bottom line is never going to go away; if your software isn't liked by users then it's your problem, not theirs.

Instead, lets blame the idiot vendor they're relying on to deliver their solutions.

The 1 system not running Linux in my house is my wife's Macbook. My 2 daughters run Linux successfully. We all print to and scan from a multi-function scanner/printer/fax/copier. We can all network print. I have a scanner that I use for more detailed work. My wireless router is a homebrew running Linux which also functions as a print server.

My business runs on Linux. My client solutions run on Linux. I'll just say it, my world runs on Linux.

This isn't about Linux "just working" for cheap crappy disposable "win-printers". This is about Linux for business printers. These are the same sorts of heavy duty workhorse printers that were working well in the early days of SunOS with little in the way of explicit printer vendor + OS vendor interaction.

This isn't about random cheap crap that was chosen entirely based on the fact that it had the lowest price tag that day.

I've recommended linux to my friends who are using netbook, i.e. mostly sharing common configurations with no obscure hardware expected.Whilst they don't have driver issues, the most common complaints are:

- Poor and inconsistent UI. They particularly hated that Ubuntu was swapping the buttons around often.- Many open source software are feature-incomplete when compared to their commercial counterparts.- Linux desktop (esp. Ubuntu) is very unstable when it comes to updates; ha

I live in Geneva, and here everything government does supports Linux. The government is using open source software everywhere and they haven't complained a bit about it. Just the opposite. Software for taxes is available on Windows, Linux and MacOS X. Although I don't think is FOSS (haven't seen the license yet).

I've been migrating people to open source servers and desktops in Latin America for years, and sometimes I've found the classical resistance from users. I mean, you really must give the users a great experience in order for them to like the switch. I've seen users complain vocally when forced to use old desktop environments (particularly old KDE releases). But usually if you move them to a more modern and better configured desktop system they appreciate it, especially if they're coming from Windows XP or older.

Printer support was quite ugly in the olden days, not to mention the odd (but functional) Xsane software for scanning. Things have been getting better in the last two years, but still these German users probably had to deal with some pretty ugly things. They may have been switched too early.

Linux is mostly ready for the desktop now: for an office clerk desktop is good enough, even better. For a programmer is excellent. For most people is fine. But there are some proprietary software that some people won't be able to do without. Fortunately it isn't Microsoft Office or Internet Explorer anymore, so we've gained some ground. People are happy with OpenOffice.org and Firefox/Chrome these days, they have even started dreading some bloated proprietary packages already (e.g. Internet Explorer).

We're nerds, for us a command line is enough, but for users change is stressful enough. And there's the issue of the helpdesk people, who feel really threatened by the switch, especially when they're not so smart, like is usually the case in government positions. Supporting Windows means upgrading antivirus and formatting computers. Most users have administrator access in their machines, so no problems with file permissions or the like. Windows networking is dead simple, and desktop hardware support for Windows is really easy to get. It's ugly, inelegant, but it's there, and it sort-of works, and its quirks are well-known. Habits get engrained.

The lesson to learn here would be to look at what the users need. Look at the shortcomings they might find, and anticipate them. If you know they'll need to use Xsane to scan, because they need some complex stuff, provide some documentation in a Wiki already before the migration. Provide little howtos on common tasks. Make the documents editable by them. Give them help and let them help one another. Move the users to the new system in small groups and have a technical person exclusively assigned to help the last migrated bunch of ten or so. Don't ram change down their throats, let them drive it.

If the company is large enough, hire some expert programmers, or a programming outsourcing firm to improve on some open source packages that are essential for business. That will not cost so much.

If there's technical people that dread change, that will refuse to upgrade their skills and embrace the new OS, _fire them_, Change is necessary and your team needs to be able to cope with it, especially the technology people.

I call BS. Each and every one of those "Office" printers are devices that are network-centric. By definition it has to support a Jetdirect, LPR/LPD, and at least an IPP print queue- and use PCL or Postscript for the print command language.

I've not had a "problem" needing "drivers" for an "office" printer for the last decade.

It is worth noting in this context that there were a number of changes of government in Germany, implying that party politics might also have played a role. Between 1998 and 2005, the German government was a coalition of social democrats and greens (with a green foreign minister); between 2005 and 2009, the government was a coalition of christian democrats (conservatives) and social democrats (with a social democrat foreign minister); and since 2009, the government has been a coalition of christian democrats and liberals (with a liberal foreign minister). The "SPD" mentioned in the article is the social democrat party.

Henning Tillmann, a colleague of Oliver Kaczmarek, the SPD MP who raised the question, and a member of the SPD executive committee's web policy discussion group, told our associates at heise Open that the government's response was not satisfactory. "The reasons given for the return to Windows are implausible," says Tillmann, "We need the figures." The costs of licensing Windows and MS Office throughout the department would cover the costs of programming a hell of a lot of drivers, notes Tillmann. Oliver Kaczmarek has already announced his intention to take the matter further and demand a clear statement from the government.

We have scanners and printers running no problem in our office on Ubuntu. Why exactly does he mention having to program printer and scanner drivers?

They might have a legitimate problem but from the information presented it sounds like poor excuses when someone asks for the exact figures and he responds with the need to write drivers. It sounds like something Microsoft would say from their "get the facts" campaign.

Driver support hugely depends on the vendor (and sometimes even on the model).

For example, at a previous company we had some of those souped-up copiers Canon sells for twelve grand a piece. The kind that is supposed to do everything short of making coffee.Canon's management software for the Windows servers (rights management based on LDAP groups and stuff like that) must have been written by half-blind chronic drunks, but it still worked somehow. But Canon treated the Linux driver as the company's bastard c

We have scanners and printers running no problem in our office on Ubuntu. Why exactly does he mention having to program printer and scanner drivers?

Now I'm just throwing this out there, but it might be possible that there's more then one printer company that makes more than one type of printer so that there might exist in one of the foreign offices of the German government a printer of a make and model which isn't the exact same as yours?

What bass-ackwards printers are they using? I'd have guessed that most printers used in a corporate environment are postscript based, so support shouldn't really be an issue. Secondly I thought scanners just used SANE? Which is why the Windows drivers work right? Why not have a windows print server?

I think what's happened here is that the spokesman has had the problem 'simplified' to his level of understanding because the actual issue is either to complex or is actually BS.

What bass-ackwards printers are they using? I'd have guessed that most printers used in a corporate environment are postscript based, so support shouldn't really be an issue.

Not in my experience. Printers tend to be a crazy mess of different technologies supplied by the cheapest supplier/closest friend of the IT Manager/whatever someone found at Best Buy/etc. I'd estimate maybe 25% of the printers I've seen in corp environments support Postscript, about 50% support some variant of PCL (which mostly overlaps the Postscript ones) and the rest are a mix of custom drivers and just plain bizzare cruft.

If it makes you feel any better, the non-PS/PCL ones tend to not have x64 driver

A comment from someone in the government shows that this isn't going down without a fight. The FO's answers to inquiries claimed driver costs were high. Officials say that something's wrong if writing drivers costs more than refitting the entire bureau with new Win/Office licenses.

It's hard not only for governments. A retail operation was trying to switch to Ubuntu boxes and one of the problems became Zebra LP 2824 thermal printer drivers [zebra.com], which are all for windows and none are for unix/linux. Of-course CUPS support these printers to an extent, but not completely and the worst part is printing in Cyrillic - it doesn't work. Barcodes do print and English prints though. Is this a show stopper for Linux on desktop? It well could be in this case.

It makes me wonder what arcane version of Linux they were using - or what kind of obscure brand of printers and scanners they insist on using. Any serious manufacturer these days supports Linux.

Now I know not all printers have Linux drivers available; yet this migration has been going on for five years and has been planned probably for years before that.Easy enough to replace equipment that comes to the end of its life span with equipment that's known to work with Linux. At least that is assuming they have a serious and competent IT department.

I am sure that with the money they spend in Windows licenses, they could have bought new compatible printers and scanners. Come on, most high grade, networked all-in-one printers and scanners are compatible with Linux.

I am sure that with the money they spend in Windows licenses, they could have bought new compatible printers and scanners. Come on, most high grade, networked all-in-one printers and scanners are compatible with Linux.

You're assuming that's the sort of gear that's at issue. My bank in Canada uses small receipt printers at each teller's desk. They've also had cheque scanners that read the codes at the bottom, often printed in MICR toner.

While I don't know that the decision isn't ridiculous, I'm not going to assume it is. They may not be having problems with large-scale group printers that we all know can be made to work (well). It may be smaller, industry-specific gear that has lead to this problem. We don't know. S

I work at a university campus library, we're a tiny little outfit (a mere 140 staff). However we deal with public service as well as maintaining fairly sophisticated servers for the collections and providing cafe-style computer access to students.

140 staff, another 100 student accessible machines. All are running windows, and those licenses run us $0. This is partly because the people in charge won't allow buying anything but IBM (lenovo) which means that all computers come with windows. The other part of it is Microsoft giving us the software we need free because they want people hooked.

We have $64,000 in printers, $34,000 of which need to be replaced if we switch to linux, another $10,000 that should be replaced as support is existent but spotty. (I went through all of this when I tried to get a switch happening).

Without going into staff training or anything else, that means a cost of at least $34,000 (around $250 per staff) in printers to switch to linux. I assure you that printers are a big part of linux's problem in the workplace.

Is it unfair to linux that the extra cost of buying lenovo desktops can't be factored in (I could by locally for about half the price)? Yes.

Is it unfair to linux that Microsoft gives away software (and developers to manufacturers) where needed to make the switch to linux harder to sell? A little, but that's business.

Does it matter? No.

The simple fact is that as much as I do like linux, Microsoft isn't lying when they say it's more expensive in the workplace. They're being slightly underhanded, but not lying.

... the cost of adapting and extending it, for example in writing printer and scanner drivers...

Why are they writing their own drivers? As a sizable buyer of equipment (the government, not the single department) they could simply tell HP and other vendors that the government will only be considering equipment that has Linux drivers.

While it's very likely that Microsoft-addicted users complained, I am absolutely certain that no resources were spent on "writing printer and scanner drivers", thus making the whole claim untrustworthy.

Someone has to be investigated for corruption -- IIRC, in Germany it actually something that matters.

right... it's much easier to be interoperable when everyone is running the same (MS) crap... morons, that's not interoperability....as for writing printer drivers, well, their fault for not selecting a manufacturer that makes sure it's hardware is compatible, such as HP

I mean, I suppose I don't really know much about this, but did they really have the sort of volume where a rollback to Windows was cheaper than writing printer drivers, and writing printer drivers was cheaper than buying a printer with open drivers? Seriously, what doesn't CUPS support these days?

What follows will look like flamebait from a troll to anybody who wants to ignore the truth, but if the situation is ever going to improve, all of us who use Linux and want it to succeed need to stop ignoring reality. Linux users need to learn to take criticism properly. The simple fact is that for most non-geeks, Linux sucks (I have been using it for years and my business runs almost entirely on Linux, but even I find it almost more trouble than it's worth). If the end user has a problem with Linux, the proper response is to say "wow, we need to better understand the users and we need to fix these problems" rather than posting hostile messages on the web (not saying your particular post was hostile, but it often happens when people complain about Linux) that accuse users of being stupid, or posting responses to cries for help that amount to "RTFM!" or "use the force, read the source!"

You ask "what doesn't CUPS support these days?", and I say: all but one of the printers my business uses, and support for that one is flaky..... and why should I need one of the worst applications ever written (CUPS) anyway? I dare you to setup a PC with Linux and CUPS and then ask your parents to do something important with it. Odds are, they'll get frustrated and give up without ever getting a single page out of the printer. If they ever have to add a new printer, they'll never succeed. It's a clumbsy, non-obvious pile of junk that has a non-intuitive user interface. Printing in Linux simply stinks; half the time you get blank pages, or pages of garbage ASCII characters instead of the nice output that any idiot can get from Windows or a Mac with a couple of mouse clicks. No average PC user thinks of firing up a web browser and entering a raw IP address into the URL line to get at the printer controls. In Windows, it's very easy to setup, control, and use printers. In Linux, printing appears to be an after-thought that was quickly hacked-in under extreme schedule pressure with the user interface being setup through the web browser because it was quick and easy for the programmers.

Linux audio similarly sucks (can we please have a single standard programming interface that supports both open- and closed-source applications equally well?!?!?!, scanners suck too (Sane was a good first try.... ten years ago). Have an all-in-one scanner-printer unit? Odds are you'll have troubles. The nearly religious fanaticism for "open" code is only making things worse.... I have nvidia cards in most of my systems and use the nvidia binary drivers (they work and make the Linux boxes every bit as good as any windows box for our custom in-house cad software) but now new Linux distros insist on including crappy open-source nvidia drivers and making it hard to use the good binary drivers from nvidia! Why? Was it because there was no way to make both options easy? Nah, apparently just because some jerks appear to have decided that "open" did not just mean free and open code shipped with Linux, but that actual hostility to non-open code was to be encouraged. When we upgraded some systems and ran into this issue, we had to waste a bunch of time spelunking on the internet trying to find the solution (why did we even have to look? adding support for the new drivers, even as the default, should not have made the newer Linux release even harder to use than a previous release for people who need the closed drivers) That just does not fly for end users, no matter how happy (in an obnoxious "my way or the highway" sense) it might make some coders with an open source purity test complex.

Maybe the Germans needed to add an app to some desktops. In Windows land, you stick an installer for the app on the machine, wait a few moments and you are ready to roll. In Linux land, you might get a tarball or RPM, stick it on the machine, find that there are 5942 dependency issues, you need 3 hours with a high-speed net connection to download and patch everything, need to change compiler versions, need to update glibc, need to update the Kernel, nee

what the number of security / virus issues was (or wasn't ) during the period of using Linux in the office ? I do tech support for a medium sized school district and we are constantly getting pretty sophisticated phishing emails to some of our staff. And some staff still fall for them or send out emails or try to reply... Fortunately we are 70% Mac based so most of that just blows by.

The issue with teachers is that they regularly email parents and students who may have infected PCs and their email addresses are then harvested.

You spend all that money training people and changing the culture of your office to become more open minded and active learners with regard to technology only to switch back after you spent all the resources. Of course people are going to complain, change isn't always easy but if you facilitate the transition through training or knowledge management it eventually pays itself off.

We still have some staff members using typewriters. I shit you not.Never underestimate just how reluctant people are to change.Especially when there is no incentive to do so.And you want them to work harder to learn something that does the exact same thing except its cheaper for you.And you expect them to get the same amount of work done different system.And you cut their pay.And their money isn't worth as much anymore.And they could probably earn more as a bar tender.

Ways to make a change feasible.Rule #1: If it doesn't make sense to the person doing the work to switch ie. no discernible benefit your screwed before you even started.Rule #2: Build solitaire directly into clones of word and excel.Rule #3: Build facebook games directly into all office apps.

In other words: They are able to do their jobs now with what they have and you want to "help" them continue doing their jobs by making them learn something new.

I made money modernizing offices, and the attitude you have shown is counter-productive.

The number one error that office managers seem to make is buying a PC with a word processor and a spreadsheet program and installing it on each employee's desk. After which they instruct the employee to learn how to use it, and quickly go to their superior and brag about how they modernized the office. The mistake being that no effort was made to understand why the employee was so productive, and giving the employee a general purpose tool to replace what they were accustomed to using. This results in the employee having to learn something new "to make someone else's job easier" and the employee "knowing" that the office manager is trying to make himself indispensable by introducing something into the workplace that only he understands.

In one of the offices that I "modernized" there was an employee that used a typewriter to keep up with the inventory. It worked flawless for him, and since the trucks arrived very early in the morning, he had all workday to do the tallies. He would white out the totals and add new truckloads to the bottom of the list, cross out the truckloads that were no longer at the warehouse, add up all the numbers, and put a new total at the bottom of the list. He would then make photocopies of his "master list" and send them to the other office workers. He did this every day for the past 15 years, and he was able to do all this quickly (much faster than I thought possible). I was able to "win him over" by creating a specialized spreadsheet application that allowed him to continue to work the way he was accustomed to, and he saw that the instantaneous totals made his job easier. The key was to make the software conform to the worker.

Today I see the reverse being done. Terminals that had forms that the data entry clerk could quickly fill in are being replaced with window machines running software that don't even come close to being the same thing. Worse I've seen terminals being replaced by windows machines running terminal emulators. This shows a lack of thought by IT. No wonder employees despise them. Of course IT people are accustomed to windows, so they don't see why the employees are so problematic...

I did this all in the 80's when personal computers in the office were new. I'd thought people would have it easier today.

as the other departments were using windows and so the cost of writing the drivers wasn't being shared out amongst all of them, but kept in the single department... anyway, they should have been insisting on hardware only coming from manufacturers who provided Linux support... buying winprinters and expecting them to work on Linux is just stupid...

The foreign office is in the hands of a party (FDP) that from its political standpoint would clearly favor proprietary software over open source. The open source initiative was started by the previous office holder, who came from the other end of the political spectrum (the German Green party)
Whatever real problems there may or may not be, they almost certainly are not the reason for this switch.

"standardised proprietary client solutions" is what the article says they want to return to.By all means, they didn't get it: It is not about the software; but about standards. If I were a German taxpayer, I'd be up in arms: From now onwards, again, taxpayers' monies are used to produce documents that are inaccessible in future. Ask your parents, how nicely old MS-Office documents can opened in newer software versions: zero and nada.

Nobody knows what is in the windows updates.... (beside maybe some Microsoft employee)I would think that a gov. body should consider security as a top priority !(Is anybody concerned that one day all WIndoze machines just stop and the whole department is stuck ?)

Also, even assuming the TCO is the same Win-Linux (I do not believe this) but instead of shipping money to Redmond you keep them in Germany, something a government should think about, or not ?

It all comes down to the lack of focus and consistency with a few Open Source projects. Unfortunately making a desktop environment does not lend itself to a every-developer-is-equal type environment. In order to succeed a desktop environment project needs to be ruled with an iron fist from top to bottom.

See (albeit non-Open Source) examples: Windows, iOS.

This does not sit well with at all Open Source developers in general. The concept of a dictatorship flies in the face of whatever they hold dear.

as they were the only ones involved in the experiment, then their costs of writing drivers weren't being shared out... also, they should have absolutely insisted on hardware having to have Linux support out of the box from the suppliers. Expecting winprinters to work is rather stupid as winprinters aren't really printers at all as the manufacturer has shed a lot of cost by using the computer itself to do the hard work.

Almost no need for comments here in Slashdot as the second half of the article "balances" the initial assertions.

Essentially, one group in a political party is against the use of F/OSS in favor of Microsoft and other BSA groups' products. They give arguments that do not contain any figures to support their claims. The article indicates this much but also asserts that the costs of creating various forms of support for hardware are CERTAINLY less than the costs of Windows and other software licenses. (You can almost certainly expect Microsoft to step in to offer discounted license costs to the German government to prove that's not true as they have in the past)

With all that said, it certainly does show there is still an uphill war going on where hardware support is concerned. Without question, the battles have mostly been won though the determination of developers, hackers and crackers where the results are an extensive pool of hardware supported under Linux. Trouble is, hardware development hasn't stopped and new ways to shut out access to Linux users have been added as it goes on. One that gets under my skin most recently is NVidia's Optimus technology that has made the use of the nvidia gpu impossible on my little alienware.

Until hardware makers are legally inhibited from doing so, this will go on for as long forever or until Windows becomes the next IBM or Novell. (Nobody believed IBM on the desktop could be killed off... nobody believed Novell on the server could be marginalzed either and they both happened. Why anyone thinks Microsoft Windows will still dominate in 5 years amazes me. They might, but they might not -- things are changing rapidly and there is still lots of government support and development of Linux around the world.)

Sounds like too many staff were experienced with Windows and didn't like learning something new... training, missing functionality, lack of usability and poor interoperability all sound like the complaints I've heard from users when asked to use a different system.

Incidentally, what on earth were they writing printer or scanner drivers for? Could they not specify 'compatible with our environment' on the RFP?

Henning Tillmann, a colleague of Oliver Kaczmarek, the SPD MP who raised the question, and a member of the SPD executive committee's web policy discussion group, told our associates at heise Open that the government's response was not satisfactory. "The reasons given for the return to Windows are implausible," says Tillmann, "We need the figures."

In the 80s you didn't need to be a geek to use a computer, but at the same time you learned basic ideas that would let you feel at home on any system or OS. Now people just think, "Go to the start menu. No start menu? What the fuck what do I do???"

True. I have long discounted Free/Open Source software for productivity tools. My servers run Debian, but I would never again use that on my desktop. Though I moved upwards to OS X, not downwards to windows, I can relate to those users.

a lack of usability

Also true, most Free/Open Source software is still made and designed by geeks for geeks, and hasn't had a desperately needed visit to a usability expert. Usability is not something you can do as an afterthought. Either you have it designed in from the start, or it won't be th

I can understand that they would not want to use Linux if they have to write printer drivers for it! But in my experience, network printers work out of the box with Linux both for duplex and four-color printing. What kind of special printing requirements would the German Foreign Office have where the regular printing setup isn't good enough? Does Windows come with specialized printing drivers?

While Linux and the open desktop have certainly come a ways since - even 5 years ago, it saddens me to say that neither are ready for the proverbial "prime time".
While I can't imagine using anything but GNOME these days, I have a much larger threshold of putting up with things like unavailable codecs, incompatible drivers, and just plain software unavailability - possibly because in most such cases, I'm willing to make the effort to figure out how to make things work. We're getting there though, and the st

I never bothered to post here because all I had was Norwegian sources, but here in Norway there's been two major blows to OpenOffice adaption. Both the county and region that used to push it the hardest has announced plans to migrate back to MS Office, taking with it 4000 and 20000 users back to Microsoft. When the total public sector is some 800000 people and already 90%+ Microsoft, it's creeping back up towards 100% not down. And if you can't do without MS Office, you can't do without Windows. Linux on th

The foreign office is run by Guido Westerwelle, leader of the FDP (so called "liberals") who are pretty known for having close ties to companies and the industry in general. To be more blunt: pay them enough money and they do what you want them to do. Just recently they halved the taxes on hotel bills - after receiving a noticeable amount of money from a company running lots of hotels (Mövenpick) for their election campaign a few months prior.

So it's safe to assume that some coffers with money changed owners in return for this step. They are corrupt (pretty much everyone knows this) and they use it where ever they can. So far they (mostly) managed to stay within the legal limits (which is not too hard considering that there are very few restrictions for politicians in Germany, so basically once elected you can do pretty much anything you like without too much fear of of any serious consequences).

is not that they're moving back to Windows, but that they're moving back to Windows XP. I could understand it better if it were WIndows 7. Although they'll inevitably upgrade at some point, it seems a lot of hassle to go back to an inferior operating system for a transitional period.

The reason I think Windows 7 would make more sense than XP (aside from all the support and security issues), is that Windows 7 really does offer something that neither KDE nor Gnome do which is a very simple and easy to manage environment. I like both Windows 7 and my KDE desktop running on Gentoo. I like Windows 7 because it is really slick. I like my Linux box because it's powerful, has all the tools I need to do advance things I like to do. The trouble is that someone like me is an edge case. I wouldn't want to see KDE or Gnome attempt to emulate Windows so much that they lost the powerfulness that I like about them (KDE more than Gnome is my preference mind you). But similarly, I think you couldn't fully incorporate the power of Linux into Windows 7 without losing some of that slickness and simplicity. There seems to be a natural divide between the two where either attempting to bring in the qualities of the other is likely to spoil some of the good stuff. And unfortunately the German FO users are going to be the sort of users who want slick simplicity, rather than crunching power. I say unfortunately, because Windows will cost them more.

That's just wordplay. As it stands now, Linux on the desktop is never going to happen, is a valid statement. Things can change, but the only sliver of "well, it *might* happen" requires significant changes that are not historically justified.

It's not "wordplay". You can't say something was "never going to happen" whilst the thing is still going on. Every year, the number of Linux desktops has grown. You can argue the liklihood of where it's going to go from here, but it can hardly be said with confidence that Linux desktops are "never going to happen".

This is the crux of the discussion. 1% may be "huge" if you gathered all these people together in one room, but in the wide world they are wholly insignificant.

And the point I was very clear on is that you may say 1% is a small percentage but in real terms that presents a very large number of people, more than adequate to support not merely one desktop e

We can do an instant poll of/. readers right here inline! Then it wouldn't be anecdotal. Errrr, well, maybe it would but it would be less anecdotal. Except for the self-selection and lack of double blind and randomly selected poll targets and...

Personally, I'm typing this on a linux system and have been using linux desktops more or less exclusively for oh, fifteen years, sixteen years, who can remember. Since the days that Slowaris replaced SunOS. I do run XP Pro safely in a nice little VM on the rare occasions I need a specific piece of Win-only software, where it can do no harm. Obviously Linux cannot possibly provide a functional desktop, and the fact that my Luddite wife is typing away on the other side of the room is some sort of atavistic exception or the result of spacetime distortion from another dimension.

One does wonder just what the German Foreign Office was doing that required them to "write printer and scanner drivers" or train people. I envision a training session just like this:

Hello, today I'll be your personal trainer, and we'll see if we can wean you away from Windows. Let's see -- login, check. Type your userid into this itty bitty box, then your password. That's p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d. Now, to write a word-processed document you have to click this icon and select this second icon. No, I know, there's no fourcolor box at the lower left. Yes, I mean the foot. I know, a foot isn't as pretty as the fourcolor square thingie, but click it anyway, there. Now that one, yes. Good job!

What? You don't know what to do? Look, see the funny little blinky thing? That's called a cursor. Now, press a key. Look! A letter appears on the screen! It is the same letter. If you want to write a document, say a strongly worded note urging Mubarak to step down, you press these keys in sequence to type a letter. I know, I know, you miss your Microsoft Word (tm). It came with Strongly Worded Letter templates and Open Office doesn't, but try to bear with me. Now, let's see if you can s-a-v-e and p-r-i-n-t. Yes, yes, yes, no, not that one, down one, oh, sorry did we forget to change the character set and language settings to German well here, oh look now you can read all of the commands except of course all of the icons are little pictures and you don't really need to. Goodness, it isn't printing!

Hans? Hans! Could you write a print driver for this printer? She wants to print. What's that? Did we actually plug the printer in to the system and select it from a menu? No, we tried inserting this CD that came with the printer and it wouldn't run, said something about needing Windows. Cups? No thank you, it is too early for a cups of beer, but cups of coffee would be nice. Systems administrators? Why certainly. All of our systems were set up by MCSEs, who (as everybody knows) have the best possible education in systems management and training that money can buy and earn fabulous salaries as a consequence. Hans? Well, he's our only linux trained admin -- we didn't want to have to fire all of our former staff -- and because none of these CDs work, he has to spend all of his time writing drivers for these cheap-ass Taiwanese printers we bought.

Now let's work on the Internet. We are going to s-u-r-f the w-e-b using a b-r-o-w-s-e-r. I know, I know, there is no little "e" on the menu bar, click on that reddish orange thing. It's supposed to be a "firefox". What? Yes, I know there is no such thing as a firefox. Y'know, it does look a bit more like a pearl dripping orange sherbet or a plucked out eyeball, now that you mention it. Look, try squinting a bit. See it? A firefox. Anyway, try clicking it. I know, you're used to clicking the "e" for "explorer" and this is quite different, but go ahead, give it a shot. There! See? Where are all of the ads? What happened to the viruses you used to get that would send Mubarak offers to

You see this is where I come from...
Windows does do what I want 100% of the time. It has a nice desktop, it is after XP SP3 stable, secure (enough if you use common sense) and has all the software I need.
Linux does it about 98% of the time. But I run things in Wine and use Linux - the reason being that I've gotten burnt by vendors ceasing to trade. Ceasing to offer support.
In particular, one vendor who is now defunct stopped providing updates for their software. That's when we found that there was a t

To be fair, that applies to most people in most areas of life; people like the things that they're used to, that they know how to use and don't have to spend ages thinking about.

Or are you saying that if I took your Linux machine away and gave you a Mac instead, you wouldn't find it annoying that not all the apps were the same and that things didn't quite work the way you wanted them to? I know I find it annoying when I switch between OS's and something I'm used to isn't there anymore.

Linux as a desktop doesn't do everything I want it to, so I still run Windows; as a server, on the other hand, it does everything I want it to for some tasks, so I use it and where it doesn't, I use something else that does.

Just as people who work on Open Office or Ubuntu or Django or anything else that isn't produced by Microsoft will also post on Slashdot, sometimes logged in, sometimes as AC. What's the problem? You're implying that anyone saying something positive about MS or their software must be doing so because they have a financial interest. That isn't so. For example, if I had a choice between using MS Excel 2010 or Open Office, I would certainly choose Excel. If I have a choice between running Apache or IIS, I will certainly choose Apache (unless I need some particular integration with IIS by other software). Many of us here discuss things as they are, not because we have some absurd allegiance.